Sins of the Father
by kaiserklee
Summary: Yoshimura knows that Eto isn't here to save him, but he's grateful that she came for him anyway. (Yoshimura's thoughts when seeing Eto during the Anteiku Raid.)


Yoshimura knows she isn't here to save him.

He's just barely conscious when the grotesque form of the One-Eyed Owl crashes onto the rooftop, its hissing, rattling breath loud enough to be audible over the din of erupting shockwaves. Yoshimura has never seen his daughter like this before – or seen her at all since leaving her in Noroi's hands. In the twenty-four years of her life he has only held her as a baby, and he remembers only that small, pitiful creature, defenseless, crying for the mother that no longer lived.

How different she looks now.

Eto is very much like him.

Her Kakuja form resembles his, only larger and more powerful, more than three times the size of his own and easily dwarfing the CCG investigators; there's a hint of pride before Yoshimura realizes just how much she must have cannibalized to reach those titanic proportions, and there's a sharp pain in his chest that isn't from the accruement of battle wounds. Still, the similarity warms him. Here is proof that she is his daughter. She bears the same form, the same mask—

But as Eto slaughters her way through the investigators, Yoshimura realizes that she is very much _not_ like him. She's laughing. Her mask is marred by a leer and the red glare emanating from her single eye reveals more malice than words could ever achieve. Her Kakuja is a mass of pulsating red flesh and misshapen limbs, angry thorns and spines that jut out at painful angles, and everything about it is raw and primal and furious even in completion.

Suddenly Yoshimura's thoughts turn to Kaneki, and he wonders how he could have failed so utterly.

Eto takes her time tormenting that boy, the one with the scythe – Suzuya – flinging him back again and again, crushing his flesh and cracking his bones against the rubble, but her words must hurt him more than physical pain. She's laughing at his ineffectual strikes, mocking his inability to save the other investigator, Shinohara. Eto laughs, and laughs, and laughs. Yoshimura wants to tell her to stop. He has no great love for doves; even so, the bond between parent and child is sacred. Eto spits on it with every word, and Yoshimura wants to tell her to just kill the boy and spare him from this torment.

At last, Arima arrives. When the battle begins, Yoshimura feels an upwelling of concern that surprises him; Eto is powerful, too powerful for him to worry about, but he instinctively wants to throw his broken and battered body into the path of Arima's lightning strikes. Before long, though, Eto ends the battle, pounces towards him, and Yoshimura can do nothing when she swallows him whole and flees.

After what feels like an eternity being imprisoned inside the hollow gut of her Kakuja, Yoshimura feels the stomach walls contract and push himself up. He's regurgitated, none too gently collapsing onto the ground as Eto heaves beside him.

"Ahh, that was disgusting!"

It's the way she says it that lets Yoshimura know she didn't mean having to vomit him out. Eto meant that _he_ was disgusting, that _his_ presence was disgusting; that having to save him at all was disgusting. She despises him, and rightly so. He can understand her fury. He just wishes she weren't laughing that deranged laugh. He wants her to rage at him, beat him, even, demand answers about why he killed her mother and abandoned her in the bloodiest ward. Instead she laughs, and he knows her mind is broken.

Eto's Kakuja dissipates, and Yoshimura sees his daughter for the first time. Bandages trail uselessly behind her real form, remnants of her previous disguise, but her face is revealed now.

"…Eto."

Yoshimura realizes he was wrong.

She is not like him.

…She looks like Ukina.

"Otouuuuusan," Eto croons.

Yoshimura doesn't hear the saccharine voice, doesn't see the single red eye. His eyes are blurring but through his swimming vision he sees Ukina. In Eto he sees the same hair framing both sides of her face, the same gentle features, and Eto's human eye is the same shape and color as Ukina. Shadows obscure that half of her face while Eto grins down at him, but Yoshimura doesn't need to see it to remember. His lips curve into a smile, and Eto cocks her head as though she had been expecting him to be terrified or repentant.

Yoshimura knows that Eto isn't here to save him, but he's grateful that she came for him anyway.

Grateful that the last thing he sees is the face she shares with her mother.


End file.
